“I wish to supplement the warranted assertion that our experience of non-human nature is largely constructed by human culture, with an acknowledgement that human culture is itself structured and informed, in diverse ways, by the wider-than-human matrix of powers in which it is embedded. While our notions of the world may be structured by our particular culture, cultures are themselves structured by the interplay of gravity, winds, waters, and sunlight, by the migratory movements of various animals and the nutritional and medicinal powers of particular plants. Human culture, that is, is itself influenced, organized and mediated by many agencies that are not human or of human artifice.”

“Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.”